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Programming Note: Comments RSS

For those who worry about missing comments made in old threads, this might help. It is the RSS feed that nourishes the recent comments list in the sidebar. Perhaps in conjunction with your RSS reader you can catch comments before they slip away. To the best of my knowledge, there is no way to make it show more than the ten most recent. If you find a way to make it show more, I’d like to hear about it.

Excellent! thanks. Now for a stupipd question…I type in RSS in my mozilla help and it comes up empty. How do I invoke this rss thingy-ma-jingy?
(My calc I prof said there was no such thing as a stupid question, just the one you shoulda asked but didn’t. He also said that people who didn’t know the quadratic equation shouldn’t be allowed to vote. Maybe he’s bi-polar.)

You need an RSS reader to take advantage of the feed. Safari supports RSS by allowing you to save the link just like a bookmark — when there are new things in the feed the bookmark shows a number next to it. If the bookmark is in a folder, the folder will show the total number of new items for all feeds it contains. You can configure how often the browser checks the feed for updates.

For me, Opera and Firefox both launch Safari to show the feed, since in Safari’s preferences I have it set to be the default reader. I tried changing it to firefox and opera, but they didn’t work (Firefox said it didn’t know how to handle “feed” protocol, Opera got stuck in an unpleasant loop).

A very brief search seems to indicate that Mozilla put their RSS reader in their email program, Thunderbird. I think this is pretty common, so you should check whatever email program you use to see if you can tell it to monitor an RSS feed. Failing that, there are probably several fairly slick RSS readers on versiontracker and similar places. There will probably be too many options to wade through, in fact.

As for your professor and voting, I think it’s possible to reconcile his views. While there may be no such thing as a stupid question, there can be a question asked of the wrong person. Voting is answering the question, not asking it.

I have to say, however, that knowing the quadratic hardly seems like a relevant qualifier for making judgments about civil leadership. Knowing the names of the Supreme Court justices or something like that would make a bit more sense. Can your calc professor name them?

Disclaimer: I could probably pick them out of a crowd, but I would have to sweat for quite a while to come up with nine names straight out of my head, and two of them would probably be retired.